Felix Salmon

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I have a piece in this week’s NY Mag about Lending Club, part of a series of profiles of what the magazine calls “boom brands“. I’ve been a fan of the Lending Club model since April 2009, and have watched its steady, disciplined growth with admiration since then. As I explain in my article, the company has changed over the years: at this point, it’s much more about the Lending than it is about the Club, and the peer-to-peer nature of the site is much less important than it was at the beginning.

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Dave Eggers’ new book, a dystopian fantasia about social media, is excerpted in the NYT Magazine this weekend. The mag’s editor, Hugo Lindgren, gushes about how the book walks “the line between satire and bracing details that feel all too real” — but the fact is that, at least judging by the excerpt, Eggers strays so far away from verisimilitude that his book barely even feels like satire. Instead, Eggers is preaching to a group of people which has already made up its collective mind that social media is dangerous, and who love to one-up each other when talking about where the slippery slope might lead.

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I don’t know which producer at CNBC had the genius idea of asking Alex Pareene on to discuss Jamie Dimon with Dimon’s biggest cheerleaders, but the result was truly great television. What’s more, as Kevin Roose says, it illustrates “the divide between the finance media bubble and the normals” in an uncommonly stark and compelling manner.

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I have to admit I’m disappointed in this one. It’s no secret that I’m very skeptical about what’s likely to happen when small, risky investments start getting lots of publicity thanks to the ban on general solicitation being lifted. And I’m even more skeptical about funds which do nothing but invest in bitcoins. But at the same time I like quite a lot of the SecondMarket business model. They provide a valuable service to private companies, and they have every ability to carve out a nice little niche for themselves as an accreditation and investment platform — a one-stop shop which allows companies and funders both to avoid much of the onerous paperwork normally associated with private investments.

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It’s hard to keep track of all the charges coming out today, in a coordinated fashion, against inter-dealer broker ICAP. For those of you who like primary documents but who don’t fancy wading through 26 pages of the the English FCA complaint or 58 pages of the US CFTC order, let me recommend the juiciest one of the lot: the Justice Department’s criminal complaint against three ICAP defendants, Darrell Read, Daniel Wilkinson, and Colin Goodman.

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Today’s a big, exciting day for anybody who has found it simply too difficult, to date, to throw their money away on idiotic gambles. Are you bored with Las Vegas? Have you become disillusioned with lottery tickets? Do micro caps leave you lukewarm? Does the very idea of a 3X ETF fill you with nothing but ennui? Well in that case today you must rejoice, because the ban on general solicitation has been abolished, and the web is now being overrun with companies like Crowdfunder and RockThePost and CircleUp which offer a whole new world of opportunity when it comes to separating fools from their money. You can even lose your money ethically, now, if that’s your particular bag. The highest-profile such platform is probably AngelList: as of today, founders like Paul Carr (alongside, according to Dan Primack, over 1,000 others) are out there tweeting at the world in an attempt to drum up new investors.